AP Physics 1: Collisions

Students started working on a lab to compare the momentum before and after a collision between two carts. This was their first time using photogates, so the first data point took some time, but then students were able to get data pretty quickly. One student pointed out I’d posted “spoiler alert” instead of a learning target, so we took a few minutes to talk about why I don’t always want to post a learning target at the beginning of a new lab.

Physics: Cart Sort Part 2

We did some whiteboarding Kelly O’Shea’s balanced forces card sort. Students seem to be doing well with what each representation shows. Students are having some trouble with the direction of the normal force, so I took some inspiration from Joe Cossette and did a quick demo where I put a balance on a board, then slowly lifted one end.

Chemistry Essentials: Board Meeting

We whiteboarded the results of last week’s lauric acid phase change lab. Students pretty readily recognized the flat sections of their graphs that occurred during a phase change. I haven’t spent a lot of time setting up the concept of energy in this class, so I think they had some trouble with the idea that the water baths were still changing the energy of the lauric acid when the temperature wasn’t changing, but I think we’ll get there.